Many consumer electronics multimedia devices are capable of storing large amounts of digital multimedia content (e.g., audio and/or video). Examples of such devices include Digital Video Recorders (DVRs), portable digital video players, portable digital audio players, etc. These devices typically receive incoming data (e.g., digital multimedia content) having a defined and specified “format.”
These consumer electronics multimedia devices receive formatted incoming data and store that data on a storage medium. Later, a user may experience (i.e., view and/or hear) the multimedia content contained in the stored formatted data. In some instances, the devices perform some intermediary processing of the incoming data before storing the data. The devices may perform this intermediary processing in order to re-format (e.g., compress or re-compress) the incoming data. This intermediate processing of converting multimedia content from one format to another is typically called “transcoding.”
Traditional consumer electronics multimedia devices transcode the incoming data as the devices ingests the data. In other words, traditional devices transcode in “realtime.” Herein, “realtime transcoding” means that the speed at which the incoming data is transcoded is at least equal to or greater than the speed at which the incoming data is received. Otherwise, the buffer for the incoming data will overflow because the device is unable to transcode and store data as quickly as the device actually gets the data. However, the realities of realtime transcoding often causes conventional devices to often exhibit a tradeoff between storage efficiency, device responsiveness (i.e., performance), and product cost.
FIG. 1 shows an example of conventional consumer electronics multimedia device 100, such as a DVR. The major relevant components of the device 100 include a multimedia data capturer 110, a transcoder 120, a storage medium 130, and a playback subsystem 140. The multimedia data capturer 110 receives incoming digital multimedia data (e.g., MPEG-2 formatted video data) from, for example, a satellite antenna (“dish”) 150. As indicated by arrow 112, the capturer 110 transfers the incoming multimedia data to the transcoder 120 as the capturer receives the incoming multimedia data.
As the transcoder 120 receives the data from the capturer 110, the transcoder 120 transcodes the data and, as indicated by arrow 122, the transcoder sends the transcoded data to a storage medium 130. The realtime transcoding performed by the transcoder 120 converts the multimedia data into another format, reduces the bit rate of the data, further compresses the data, or the like. As desired, the playback subsystem 140 gets the stored multimedia data from the storage medium 130, decodes/decompresses the data, and plays it on a multimedia presenter 160, such as a television.
As depicted, device 100 is a relatively high cost device because it includes the necessary components and complexities for performing realtime transcoding. While doing realtime transcoding is efficient for storage, it generally requires significant computing power, complexity, and cost.
Alternatively, some, less-expensive, conventional devices forego the transcoding altogether or at least minimize the processing of the incoming data. These low-cost devices may simply store the multimedia content in its native or “raw” format. Alternatively, these low-cost devices perform some lightweight or incidental realtime processing on the incoming data. While this reduces the cost of other components which would be necessary to handle (e.g., re-format and compress) the incoming data in realtime, it is inefficient with regard to storage.